Plain Dealer fileSprawling subdivisions threaten to engulf area farms, such as this one along North Carpenter Road in Medina County. The cost of housing plus transportation exceeds the median family income in much of Northeast Ohio, and reliance on automobiles also contributes to the region's poor air quality, according to a report out today.

Northeast Ohioans are carrying heavier local tax burdens and feeling the pinch of greater costs per household as development sprawls farther and farther away from older cities into suburban and exurban hinterlands.

At the same time, nearly half of the 12 counties of Northeast Ohio have high levels of racial segregation and concentrated urban poverty, while job growth remains sluggish and the region is performing below the national Gross Domestic Product, a standard measure of the total value of goods and services produced by the economy.

The “Conditions and Trends Report” — launched online Tuesday during the consortium’s monthly meeting, held in Youngstown — is intended to stir public debate over the best way to make Northeast Ohio more sustainable, economically and environmentally.

“I think it’s phenomenal,” city planner Hunter Morrison, director of the consortium, said of the new report. “We’re understanding what brings us together, what assets we share and what challenges we face, as a region.”

Public response will help guide the consortium’s work in the 18 months remaining under the federal grant as the group recommends policies, creates pilot projects, organizes a “tool kit” of best practices by local governments and establishes a regional online “dashboard” that measures Northeast Ohio’s performance.

“The strategies have to be justifiable,” Morrison said. “We have to start making data-driven decisions in Northeast Ohio.”

View full sizeNEOSCCA graph from the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium shows how Northeast Ohio's economy is underperforming the nation.

The nonprofit consortium — the biggest attempt at regional planning in Northeast Ohio in decades — includes representatives of local and county governments and agencies, plus foundations and nonprofit groups, and the region’s four Metropolitan Planning Organizations, or MPOs, which manage the flow of federal transportation dollars in Northeast Ohio.

The region is one of dozens of urbanized areas across the country to receive the HUD money under a national initiative started by the Obama administration.

The program’s goal is to coordinate federal spending in smarter ways, to bring local government spending under control and to help regions understand the true cost of long-term decisions on where development should occur.

The report for the first time compiled facts and figures from more than 140 existing local and regional plans and other sources, plus scores of maps, to create a panoramic portrait of Northeast Ohio.

View full sizeNEOSCCSprawl leads to higher transportation costs per household, according to the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium.

Participants said they believed data in the report was verifiably accurate and fairly summarized without political bias.

Among the findings:

Across most of the 12-county region of Northeast Ohio, the cost of housing plus transportation exceeds 45 percent of the median household income, a rising national indicator of affordability.

The region’s spread-out development pattern makes it difficult to improve mass-transit service.

A federal “Racial Dissimilarity Index” shows that urban areas within the region are “highly segregated.”

The preponderance of brownfields left over from early industrialization reduces land available for new industrial development, especially in cities.

As the report also found, where you live in Northeast Ohio can have a big impact on your health and how long you live.

On the plus side, Northeast Ohio has an abundant supply of fresh water and regional parks, and its medical sector is growing, although not enough to make up for job losses in the automotive industry in recent decades. Future growth is possible in the region’s high-tech industries.

“While Northeast Ohio has lagged the nation in employment growth and per capita income growth in recent decades,” the report states, “the region has significant strengths in driver and emerging industries that offer future growth potential.”

Yet, overall, the region is poorly equipped to deal with its challenges, the report says, because political power is fragmented among 400 municipalities, towns, school districts and other entities, which often make decisions that benefit themselves, without regard to the bigger picture.

Jason Segedy, chairman of the consortium and director of the Akron Metropolitan Area Transportation Study, said before the meeting Tuesday that he was struck by the ways in which poor planning in recent decades has imposed higher costs of living on Northeast Ohioans through longer commuting distances to work, gas taxes, user fees, sales taxes and other outlays.

Growth followed the corridors established by the federal interstate highway system between the late 1950s and the 1970s.

Data compiled by the consortium shows that the region’s population declined by 7 percent between 1970 and 2010 while the area of developed land increased by 33 percent, or 400 square miles. That means fewer and fewer people are paying to maintain a larger and larger footprint.

“Individuals end up paying for these costs, whether you pay a gas tax, income or sales tax, or a user fee.” Segedy said. “John Q. Public ends up paying for all this stuff, and paying for it in ways that are not apparent. We want to shine a light on what is the burden on taxpayers to pay for all these services from 400 government agencies.”

The costs imposed by the region’s sprawling development pattern “can be a fairly opaque system,” Segedy said. “To an average citizen that’s trying to pay taxes and make a living, I think it’s very opaque.”

Segedy responded to comments on cleveland.com blog posts about the consortium’s work. Some readers have complained that the planning effort is part of a plot to limit the right of individuals to live wherever they want to live.

“What we’re doing is inherently a conservative endeavor in terms of valuing communities and neighborhoods and being worried about the fiscal position we’re in,” Segedy said. “It’s not just a federal problem, it’s state and local. There’s a limited amount of money to pay for these things.”

So far, the consortium has spent about 25 percent of its available funding, which includes roughly $2 million in in-kind services provided by member organizations. Morrison said the group will continue after federal funding ends in 2013.

“The feds have given us venture capital to incubate a new way of doing business in Northeast Ohio,” he said.